A bold storefront window display in New York City spurs a debate on our ever-evolving definitions of beauty

“I think for women who want to be sexy, who want to conform to what the world tells them is sexy, it’s become a cultural norm.”

Carlyle Jansen

sex coach

There has been much buzz about the display of mannequins with unshaved pubic hair in the window of an
American Apparel
in New York’s East Houston district, which the retailer says is intended to start a conversation about what society considers beautiful.

“We created it to invite passersby to explore the idea of what is ‘sexy’ and consider their comfort with the natural female form,” a store representative told Elle — not to mention get the spotlight-loving retailer a fresh round of publicity, naturally.

More than a decade since the bare-all Brazilian wax became a fixture of many women’s grooming routines, some feel a return to hairy crotches can’t come soon enough. Over the years, the fad for hairlessness has been criticized as damaging to female body image. Feminists have argued it fetishizes a prepubescent appearance. It has been responsible for physical pain, too: a 2012 report showed emergency-room
pubic injuries
from shaving had shot up.

But after so many boys have now come of age expecting girls to look like they do in porn, are we really ready to go full bush again?

“I think for women who want to be sexy, who want to conform to what the world tells them is sexy, it’s become a cultural norm,” says Carlyle Jansen, sex coach and founder of Toronto’s woman- and LGBTQ-focused sex shop Good For Her.

Too bad, considering the beachy Brazilian has never really made sense in Canada, where we’re stuffed into chafing pants most of the year anyway and arguably need a layer of protective hair to keep our lady bits from chapping. How appropriate that the return to 1970s-style ungrooming was prefigured long ago by Canadian indie electro-punk singer Peaches, whose cheeky video for her 2001 song “Set it Off” featured a time-lapse of growing, Rapunzel-ish pubic and armpit locks.

American Apparel has also used images of the female body to push boundaries before, though rarely in a way anyone would mistake as progressive. The t-shirt and basics brand has always been notorious less for its apparel than for sexualized ads featuring vulnerable-looking, semi-nude girls, many of whom appeared underage (though one ad banned by the British Advertising Standards Authority was later revealed to feature a 23-year-old).

(Its models do differ from the mainstream in more interesting ways, however. With softer thighs and bellies, they typically look more like average women than the skeletal models on mainstream runways. And in 2012, the brand did make waves with an
older model
with long, grey hair in a clothing line aimed at middle-aged women.)

But is slapping a merkin on a mannequin really going to help make the natural look appealing to the average woman?

Or does the fact that a lady’s untrimmed mons pubis has such power to shock us an indication of the opposite — that shaving is here to stay?

Call it the law of diminishing body hair. It seems to be a general truism that once a body part is shorn of its hair and its hairless version becomes the accepted default in mainstream culture, it is unlikely that the fuzzy version will return to the norm.

In other words, once we go bare, we rarely go back, for better or worse.

Men’s chins, women’s shins and women’s armpits are all exemplars of the rule. Sure, beards have made a bit of a style comeback, but shaved cheeks remain the norm. Unshorn pits were a statement during the 1970s, but on a minority of ladies.

The problem is that pubic hair isn’t just unfashionable. A fuzzy pudendum, even neatly trimmed, has become viewed as dirty, says Jansen.

Consider this: hairy labia are so outside the mainstream in pornography that porn that featured pubic hair would be considered niche and classified in the fetish section of most sex shops.

We’re at the point where shaving has been around for so long that kids are probably seeing it around the house, too, if they happen to see their mothers or sisters in the bathroom, says Jansen.

To make au natural the default once again, it would take either a spike in the price of razors or a major sex symbol — Madonna or Beyoncé or Kate Middleton (hey, stranger things have happened) — to champion it.

“Or some male icon says, ‘I find women with pubic hair much more sexy — she smells great and you can sense her pheromones and she looks more natural,’ ” says Jansen.

What makes the hairless “norm” so specious is that untold women out there have never embraced it. One Toronto writer we know says she tried shaving when it first became popular and swore off it for life.

“I shaved it all off once, when I was 18,” she remembers. “I have sensitive skin, and all the hair follicles bled as the new hairs grew in. For several days, every step hurt. I had no desire to do that to myself again.

“I told my boyfriend I would never shave or wax again, and he didn’t mind at all. No boyfriend or lover ever has.”

The experience illustrates why the decision to go bare should be left to the individual woman, rather than being a standard of general female hygiene.

“For me the bottom issue is choice,” says Jansen. “I think if a woman wants to shave her pubic hair, you know, ‘I could leave it but I like the way it looks shaved,’ fabulous. That’s clear choice. But not to feel like we have a choice, that this is the only way to be sexy, this is the only way to be desirable, this is the only way to be a legitimate sexual being, I think it’s damaging.”

That may be, but it will take more than mannequins to make hair hot again.

Correction - January 29, 2014:
This article was edited from a pevious version to change an incorrect photo.

More on thestar.com

We value respectful and thoughtful discussion. Readers are encouraged to flag comments that fail to meet the standards outlined in our
Community Code of Conduct.
For further information, including our legal guidelines, please see our full website
Terms and Conditions.